So I’ve gotten some complaints from friends & family that I’m not keeping up my blog very well at this point. Very true I had to admit but my response has simply been that things are not all that exciting in her life at the moment.
Sure there are the truly fantastic moments when she gets a new cardboard box to play with and she does love standing on the patio table outside which drives me insane since I know she is going to fall off it one day…and there are the times when we still want to kill her because she is trying to eat us in one of her several insane moments of the day. We are rather frustrated with those still and I guess that is one of my new missions to determine what we may be able to do to keep her from going totally psycho on us but at the moment the only thing that seems to work is putting her in her crate or just walking away and putting her behind a closed door or something like that (assuming she’s not in the chase & lunge & bite insane moment). We’ve tried “no” and “ugh-unh” and all the verbal things we can think of. Shake cans have never had an impact on her at all and she simply looks at them like they don’t even make noise to begin (but we’re quite certain this is not due to a hearing problem but more that she just doesn’t care). We’ve tried the thing where you use your hand like a mother dog over the top of her snout, squeezing the skin into the teeth and not squeezing – neither of which have much effect although she may consider this playing and doing it for more than a couple of seconds hurts us so perhaps we’re to blame for that technique failing. We also have tried the whole flipping her on her side thing and pinning her til she stops moving but I guess we don’t have the patience for that either. If she is still for about 10 seconds, I let her go (this usually occurs within 3 minutes or so of starting) but then she goes right back to the nipping (and not gently or we probably wouldn’t be so bothered by it). She also seems to have developed a problem with me sitting on the couch in the living room. It’s rather random but sometimes when she walks in and sees me there, she just comes over and starts trying to get on the couch (which quickly escalates to her biting) or she just starts right in with the biting. Usually if I sit at the dinner table instead, she will pretty much ignore me and usually lie down somewhere near by.
So this has us thinking we may have to get a personal trainer in here to help us figure things out…but since she doesn’t do this when other people are around, that may not help us either. As I sit here typing, I start to wonder if it has something to do with the fact that part of the couch smells faintly of cat urine (used to have a cat that urinated on that couch a few times and I’m not sure we’ll ever fully get rid of the smell) so perhaps that has something to do with it. The instances are very random so I haven’t really noticed anything that triggers it. Don’t know if it’s an overall lack of attention because it certainly happens more often when hubbers is home in the evenings but that is also primarily when I sit on the couch anyway so I just don’t know. Guess I will have to devote some time today in between all the housework and real work to do some Googling.
Anyways, most of the time with her is still great. When she’s good, she’s really quite great and who can stay mad at a Newfie for long with those sweet faces. She is growing like a weed and it’s more than time for another weigh-in so perhaps we can swing that tonight. Her adult fur is growing in well now. Still mostly baby fur on her hind legs but the stuff on the front legs seems to be getting longer and thicker. She’s got a big stripe about 6 inches wide down her back of all adult fur now but her sides are still full of baby fur. She’s growing up into a big Newfers very quickly and it’s almost shocking how quickly they go from puppy to adult.
Hopefully I’ll be better about writing more in the next few weeks. There is a lot going on in our lives at the moment and I’ve been working like crazy (bad excuses I know lol) but we think there should be some really exciting developments in the coming weeks (don’t want to jinx it so I won’t say anything yet) but then I’ll certainly have something to write about lol.
